Ok, it’s not just CNBC but pretty much all so called news outlets They don’t report news as much as sell you something.
I was on Yahoo.com doing some financial research on Tesla. While I’m looking at the research there is a video from CNBC with some talking heads and a so called expert from Garage Monkey or some crazy name telling people that we will never give up our loud sounding big horsepower muscle cars. Or at least he won’t. We love the sound and the smell. Just look at how many classics are still around.
Well, yeah, there are lots of classics still around. In garages and museums. Unless you count the thousands that are rusted out and decaying in the barns and backyards of America. About the only place people still drive Classics everyday, Cuba. And I doubt that’s because they want to.
I remember the days of my youth riding in my fathers ’67 (maybe ’68) Dodge Charger. I remember what a cool car it was at the time. It was also a real piece of crap. It always had trouble starting and it didn’t have air conditioning . The sad part is I was to young to drive it. Had I drove it I surely would have never look at a classic ever.
In the late 70’s and early 80’s I got to drive classics like the Chevette, Chrysler K car, and Nova. There are more as I drove a lot of real junk back then. They sure didn’t make them any better. I can’t or don’t want to remember all those really bad cars of the day.
But like many folks in their late 40’s and feeling flush with cash after the market boom of the early 2000’s I went out and bought not just one but 2 classic cars. A 1967 Chevy Chevelle SS. Wow, what a cool car. Well not really. It would make a lot of noise and sounded really neat but it really drove like crap. It’s amazing people drove those things more than 10 miles a day even when they were new.
But being a glutton for punishment I bought a more luxurious classic car. A 1964 Chevy Impala. Also the SS version. This was a boat. I should have driven it before I bought but I got it sight unseen off eBay.
What these cars did most of the time was sit in my warehouse. I had to move them every time I got a delivery. After the market crashed in 2008 I decided they were just to much trouble to keep moving. They were so crappy that I never wanted to drive them. They were pretty to look at though. If I want to do that there are plenty of people who have them in garages all around me. My best friend has a 1964 Corvette sitting in his garage. He’s not a big fan of driving it either. He’s afraid that if he leaves it parked to get something to eat that someone might steal it or crash into it. It’s around 64k of wasted potential. While it keeps going up every year if he had taken the 22k he paid for it ten years ago and bought almost any decent stock it would be worth twice what it is now. And instead of parking his Kia Soul in the driveway he could fit it in the garage. That’s right, he’s driving a Kia Soul. At least when he doesn’t need his big Dodge Diesel for moving motorcycles everyday. He buys and sells them.
So as long as we are giving opinions, here are some of mine.
Just like people hated answering machines when they first came out or cellphones (the people who didn’t have one yet). The technology and price of the electric car gets more attractive every few years. It might take 10-20 years to get to the point where that’s what people want or can afford but there is no question that the technology is here and if automakers actually build them and sell them in every market people will buy them. As more people get them, more people will want what everybody else has. Just like the Navy Converted from Coal and Wood to Oil back in the day.
Used cars will hit the market as well. Just like some people wait for last years iPhone before they buy it there will be people buying 5-8 year old electric cars and loving them.
No buying gas. No oil changes. No filters to change. The scheduled maintenance is pretty much rotate the tires every 10,000 miles.
I have about 2000 miles on my Ford Focus Electric and there has only been one day where I was afraid to take it on the trip I had planned. If I had known I was going to be where I was for as long as I was it wouldn’t have been a problem. They had a charger there and in 2 hours I would have been good to go. I was there all night.
While todays ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars are really pretty good, O.K. really good they still burn gas. A product that we fight wars for. A product that we have no control over the pricing or production since most of it is imported. We use almost 80-90% more than we produce. And while people still debate if fossil fuels cause global warming there is no debate that they cause pollution. Oil spills cause catastrophic losses to wildlife and livelihoods.
Do we want to go back to the days where air pollution was so thick in many cities you couldn’t see more than a couple miles. Do we want Los Angeles or Chicago to look like Mexico City or Shanghai. Should we go back to the days where Lake Erie is dead and the rivers of Ohio burn when you light a match?
The price of gas in Phoenix is over $2.70 a gallon again. Up more than a dollar a gallon in less than 4 months. The cost of my electricity is down. At least between midnight and 5 AM. The electric company wants me to charge my car at night. They need people to use all that excess capacity that’s available at night when people are sleeping and the temps are cooler so the AC doesn’t run as much.
Another thing is there are no refineries in Phoenix using a ton of electricity to turn all that crude oil into gas. Yeah, it takes a lot of electricity to make a gallon of gas. Then it takes a lot of diesel to truck it to the gas station. Then it takes more electricity to pump it into your car.
Almost everybody in the U.S. now days has electricity already coming to their house. It doesn’t take any more modification to get it to your car than it does to hook up an RV.
The only reason I go to a gas station now is to buy a snack and use the washroom.